One of the first guests to ride Splash Mountain Ken talks about the attraction as it turns 20 and its great Show Producer, the late Bruce Gordon.

Splash Mountain is twenty years old, and I miss
its Show Producer, the late Bruce Gordon. It is impossible for me to think back
on Splash Mountain without thinking about Bruce.

It’s quite possible that without Bruce Gordon,
Splash Mountain wouldn’t have appeared at Disneyland, and, in turn, wouldn’t
have manifested at the Walt Disney World Resort or Tokyo Disney Resort.

The Grand Opening of the original Splash Mountain
was celebrated on July 17, 1989, marking the Disneyland 34th anniversary. The
attraction had began soft openings at the end of June after general cast member
previews started the evening of June 16 - which is when I finally took my first
ride after eagerly waiting for two years - a lifetime for a teenager.

Since I first found out about the coming
attraction, I had scrounged for every piece of information I could find on
Splash Mountain – the facts & figures; the design, construction, installation
and testing processes and events; how it would operate; when it was going to
open. I tried to piece together in my mind what the experience was going to be
like, as well as maintain a history of the project. Information was much harder
to come by back then than it is now. LaughingPlace.com was still ten years from
becoming a reality. Blogs? Online social networking? Websites? Nobody knew what
those things were. Disney News magazine was published quarterly, and
their Winter (late) 1988 issue did feature Splash Mountain. That was a help.

The really hardcore Disney enthusiasts might get
their information from fanzines like The “E” Ticket – which covered the
past, not the future, or Storyboard - which started publication in late
1987, or a National Fantasy Fan Club or Mouse Club meeting. Storyboard
did have a great article on Splash Mountain that boosted our anticipation.

For the technically savvy, there was a dial-up
BBS called Mouse Ears. It had one phone line, so only one person could use it at
a time. It was all text. According to what is archived at Google, Usenet
newsgroup rec.arts.disney didn’t even start until July 1990.

Cast members were sometimes a good source of
information, if they really knew their stuff, were in a position to have access
to tidbits of info and were willing to share it with a guest.

The Disney Channel might have had something, but
my family didn’t have cable. Disneyland Publicity did manage to get some word
out to newspapers, and there was a picture and some text in an issue of Los
Angeles magazine, and some technical explanations in Hydraulics &
Pneumatics Magazine. I wouldn’t be surprised if travel magazines also had
articles and blurbs, but would be surprised if they had anything that
wasn’t in Disney News. In fact, I do remember that there was something in
a scholastic magazine - probably in 1987 – that helped start my interest.

At that time, the Disney Showcase on Main Street
was a preview center, and for a while it housed a model of Splash Mountain that
was later to be found in The Disney Gallery. I frequently stopped by to study
that model. The model is seen in Disneyland: The Inside Story, which was
one of the greatest books I’d ever seen in my life.

Yeah, I was obsessed. But most teenagers obsess
about something (I mean in addition to crushes and anatomy) – a movie franchise,
a band, a game, a sport - something. My obsession was Splash Mountain.

Because my friends and I knew what Imagineers
Tony Baxter, Bruce Gordon, and John Stone looked like thanks to the
aforementioned media, we recognized Tony and Bruce as they were visiting the
attraction late in the testing period, and we struck up conversations with them.
Tony and Bruce could have easily dismissed us as silly kids with a strange
fixation and avoided us, but they didn’t. Instead, they chatted with us on a few
occasions, and as the story goes, when we took that first ride on Splash
Mountain, Bruce Gordon was there in the back seat. After all, he had helped to
facilitate our early trip. (click here for that
LaughingPlace.com story - The Original Splashtranauts)

From then on, Bruce and I would talk on the phone
or when we happened bump into each other in person, like when he playfully
participated in shooting a television special called
“Ernest Goes to
Splash Mountain”, playing himself trying to get word in edgewise while a
chatty reporter “interviews” him.

Bruce subsequently secured some goodies for us…
limited edition bumper stickers that were never sold, a press kit, stuff like
that. He did this again in January 1990, when we bumped into him at the news
media kickoff event for the Disneyland 35th Anniversary yearlong celebration
(the start of the supposed “Disney Decade”. He
walked us right in to the media center set up in the Plaza Inn and insisted the
publicity staff give us press kits.

Subsequently, I’d look for him at Disneyland
special events, and sometimes he’d be there.